I mentioned squaddies in the previous post. Good reminder. It's exactly ten years since the expiration of my first ever employment contract. A one-year full-time job with British Forces in Bosnia as an interpreter. The year of 1996 was really something. Seventeen, straight from school, I got to meet the "lads" from Liverpool, Leeds, Lancaster...of whom many were my age. A rising generation of Cool Britannia who ended in shitholes of Bosnia as peacekeepers. I was ok with that, just changed one military service into another. Instead of doing a one year conscript service in domestic forces, I managed to join the peacekeepers and get paid for what I do.
Although the subsequent years brought me more in touch with the civil component of international presence in Bosnia, that eventually launched me overseas after the university, the first year was really "a first contact" of a sort. Stories of a rising club scene in England, photos of squaddies' naked girlfriends who sparked the imagination of a club night aftermath. It was also the year that Trainspotting was showing in cinemas.
Around the camps kiosks with pirate CDs mushroomed. Locals (who I also learned to call that way and later found out that it is a perfectly suitable depiction) got their first supplies then very expensive CD burners and made a fortune on burning fresh club music, Blur and Oasis for more "refined" ones. Noel Gallagher set against the background of improvised CD shops on main roads with lightly dressed girls and bunch of lads in their full combats making noise.
I wondered what happened with that generation of screw-ups of whom many went to army to avoid being sent to corrective facilities. Regardless of their past and family background, they looked the same under the Union Jack. A Generation, indeed.
Today I found an article on bbc.co.uk where some of them, probably not those who I met, but nevertheless them, talk about how Cool Britannia perished into the unfulfilled promise of labour with style that was supposed to build the true clubbing capital of the world.
Somewhere under the bed there's a Panasonic "boogie box" I bought "tax free for British Forces" in Sarajevo AAFI that first year. There are also those "near the main road CD shops" CDs somewhere too. It's different music for me these days, but I silently lament over that year of 1996 when Cool Britannia and British tax payers' money made me cooler in Bosnia than I would usually be. It would make the story too long if I started on how things went down almost in the same way that people in that BBC article describe it. As if the shift from the immediate post-war optimism in Bosnia followed the thought path of that generation of Britons of whom many ended in Afghanistan and Iraq, and slipped into the same undefinable state of mind as a cause of promises unfulfilled.
But, as I said, it would make the story a tad too long. Read the article.
Although the subsequent years brought me more in touch with the civil component of international presence in Bosnia, that eventually launched me overseas after the university, the first year was really "a first contact" of a sort. Stories of a rising club scene in England, photos of squaddies' naked girlfriends who sparked the imagination of a club night aftermath. It was also the year that Trainspotting was showing in cinemas.
Around the camps kiosks with pirate CDs mushroomed. Locals (who I also learned to call that way and later found out that it is a perfectly suitable depiction) got their first supplies then very expensive CD burners and made a fortune on burning fresh club music, Blur and Oasis for more "refined" ones. Noel Gallagher set against the background of improvised CD shops on main roads with lightly dressed girls and bunch of lads in their full combats making noise.
I wondered what happened with that generation of screw-ups of whom many went to army to avoid being sent to corrective facilities. Regardless of their past and family background, they looked the same under the Union Jack. A Generation, indeed.
Today I found an article on bbc.co.uk where some of them, probably not those who I met, but nevertheless them, talk about how Cool Britannia perished into the unfulfilled promise of labour with style that was supposed to build the true clubbing capital of the world.
Somewhere under the bed there's a Panasonic "boogie box" I bought "tax free for British Forces" in Sarajevo AAFI that first year. There are also those "near the main road CD shops" CDs somewhere too. It's different music for me these days, but I silently lament over that year of 1996 when Cool Britannia and British tax payers' money made me cooler in Bosnia than I would usually be. It would make the story too long if I started on how things went down almost in the same way that people in that BBC article describe it. As if the shift from the immediate post-war optimism in Bosnia followed the thought path of that generation of Britons of whom many ended in Afghanistan and Iraq, and slipped into the same undefinable state of mind as a cause of promises unfulfilled.
But, as I said, it would make the story a tad too long. Read the article.
1 comment:
I am sometimes the kind of person who looks back and realizes "a year ago I was..."; "five years ago I was..." and so on. And this is sometimes to my detriment, because I can get caught in a cycle of living in the past, nostalgically pressing rewind, then play, then rewind. Over and over again. I'm not nearly as prone to this as I used to be, but still...
It's funny that you and I both have very different, but important formative memories connected with that moment in time and the cultural phenomenon (epiphenomenon?) they called "Cool Britannia." Though I don't remember people using that term for it so much while it was really going on. Like the parallel/connected "Britpop" (which I *was* very much attuned to) by the time people had affixed the label to it, by the time a whole image was being constructed and spread via the covers of major newsmagazines (I remember seeing a "Cool Britannia" cover story in Time or something, maybe in 1998) it was largely dead, or at least congealing. It had done what it needed to do.
As you know I moved to London in fall of 1995, and was there (with some breaks) until the middle of 1999. The tastes and experiences of the university years tend to influence young people anyway. In my case, my (delayed) college experience was already uprooting and transplanting me, from a comfortable but dull suburban American existence to an urban one (not untypical), and a foreign one (indeed untypical). But not too foreign! London at that time was an incredibly comfortable place for someone like me; certainly cosmopolitan and flashy but not hyper-expensive (in comparison to today). A global city, but Midwesterners and other Americans thought it was such a cold, aloof place, but I thought it was just like home. As someone in that BBC story says, those were good years; the Cold War was over, but the all-consuming fear of Middle Eastern terrorism hadn't kicked in on us. Sure, the IRA bombed Canary Wharf during my first year there, but that was all the way across the city and a minor, almost diverting inconvenience. Bombs, ha! Nothing for me to worry about. Most people monumentalize their late teens/early 20s, when they see the world shaking beneath their every step. Add in the fact that there was just so much going on around me, and it's little wonder to me now that I feel so marked by those years, being there. And I do.
I'm just wondering now as I write; was that the Golden Age?
Looking back, I experienced quite a lot there in a short period of time, including many things that are now identified with that whole period, part of the whole late 90s, hyped-up Britannia package. I didn't always grasp the importance of it (we rarely do, in the middle of the current). But I remember the fait accompli Blair victory. I also remember how I considered Tony to be pretty great - Clinton without the philandering. It saddens me to see what happened with him, and also how naive my judgments could be. I remember wandering accidentally into an exhibit of Damien Hirst's infamous sheep. And so much else: Leah Betts. Oasis vs. Blur. Ruud Gullit coming to Chelsea (and seeing Gullit out walking one Sunday morning!) along with a zillion other foreigners, changing the whole image of English soccer to what it is now - an international spectacle. Seeing Pulp at Wembley Arena (I was - and am - a fan of some of the big bands of that time.) Trainspotting. The freaking Spice Girls. Being there to see Higuita's scorpion kick, live. Di's funeral - I was out there at Kensington Gardens the night before, and from 4 am on, the day of the memorial. Not because I'm a royal family freak, but because I figured then (and have no reason to doubt now) that I will never see anything like that again as long as I live.
Which reminds me, I've still got to see The Queen.
And you, as long as you're talking about squaddies and their music and the hopes and dashed dreams of Blairite Britain, you should check out Live Forever.
I don't know how you feel, but I've realized at various times how many American pop-cultural touchstones of those years 95-99 I missed out on. A lot. How there are numerous odd patches of common ground missing between myself and my supposed generation (of Americans). I just wasn't there for them and I'll never catch up. There are all those movies I missed out on and one-hit wonder songs that mean nothing to me, but helped form the generation I'm supposed to be a part of (and we could pick apart that whole notion, dissect it along different lines, but that's another day).
In their place, some of the things that mean the most to me - and I make absolutely no apologies for pop songs and ephemeral styles meaning something important to me - are only shareable with a fairly small slice of those who were actually there, or who bought into that fragile zeitgeist, at a temporal or spatial distance. There aren't many of those people around here, that's for sure. And I suppose you might just be able to say the same. So that is distancing.
I'll embark on a big tangent, pushing off from another, very different Anglo-related pier, in the next day or two.
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